Part 1: Ideas into Design Concepts

For my product, I wanted to have a mood lamp where I could use it when studying, gaming, in the day, or in the night. Also, I planned to not have any design on the top, since I have a relatively small desk, and I figured that I would have to put some of my stuff on top of the lamp, and having a design on top would make it weaker. Plus, the objects would cover up the design on top anyway.

This is my original design plan. It shows what purpose the lamp has, what it will be like, how it will be created, what skills I will show when creating it, and it also has an isometric drawing of the final lamp and has drawings of the designs that will be on each of the sides.

Here is my final product. You can see that the sun logo and the lightbulb are identical to my original design plan, however the moon and video game controller design is different. The moon was originally based off of the super Mario odyssey power moon because I thought it was cute. However, I realized that the eyes would be really fragile, so I turned it into a normal crescent moon, mirrored it, and also added a few clouds on the way. I also changed the video game controller design. On the design plan, it had a bridge on the bottom left and the top right. However the problem with this was that it looked funky and it was really delicate. So, I came up with the design that i used for the final product, with a bridge on the bottom left and right, and a giant bridge on the top. This made it look good, and also made it really sturdy.

Part 2: Growth in Skills

For my designing skills, I think that the areas that I improved most are my problem solving skills. I exercised those skills through brainstorming of possible problems, analyzing my prototype, For example, in my original design I didn’t plan to have the thin paper behind the panels, but when the cardboard prototype was finished and I tried it with a lightbulb, there were a few problems. Since the moon and lightbulb design had a really big hole, I could visibly and clearly see the lightbulb, and I figured that it would probably blind me at night. A solution to this was the film paper. Also, the sun design turned out to be surprisingly fragile, and a solution to this was to stick the sturdy transparent film to the film paper, and then stick that on behind the panel. This way, the sturdiness of the transparent film would hold up the spiral in the sun, and it would also look nicer since it would cover up the lightbulb. The result was a lamp that would no longer blind me at night when I’m sleeping or gaming, and it was also sturdier.

For my technical skills in fusion and lightburn, I have learned how to use the tools to make creating the product easier, and make it look better as well.

For example, This was my original moon design:

I thought my original moon design was too boring, so I decided to add some clouds in the background. At first, I tried to use the spline tool, but the result was… weird:

As you can see, the result looked like a ghost, so I tried a different approach. Instead of just splining everything, I found out that I could overlap circle on each other, add a line at the bottom, and then trim the lines to make a cloud. Here’s how i did it:

After adding the clouds, this was my final moon design:

That’s one example of applying the skills I learned to the final project. Another example of this was the process of creating the video game controller design. It was a very challenging task because some of the lines were diagonal, and it was really hard to draw out the same spline on both sides.

This was what my first attempt at creating the controller looked like. I used three tools: Line, Spline, and circle. It looked really funky, and there was something uneven in the top right corner. Then, an idea hit me: If I couldn’t create the same thing on both sides by hand, why didn’t I use the mirror tool? So, I did exactly that, and my design was MUCH better.

I then used that method to create my final controller design, which looked like this:

Part 3: Reflecting & Sharing

Overall, I think that this course overall to this point has been amazing. I say that because I learned how to use professional softwares to create what I wanted, and it was really fun messing around with fusion and find out the function of each of the countless tools  offered. I am really satisfied with my growth in skills and the course overall because the final product that I created was exactly like what I wanted.

One tip that I would give to incoming students taking this course is to do everything on one sketch! I had a problem where I created the panels on one sketch, and the design on another, and when I tried to merge them together, there was a bug where multiple layers were copied. That night, I had to stay up late and delete the overlapping parts one by one, which took me an hour or so.

Another tip I would give to incoming students is to always refer to the Onenote daily log before creating designs, and plan out which tools can be used for which parts. Coming back to the making of the controller design, I really should have checked my daily log and planned out which tools I was going to use before creating it, and that would’ve saved me half a class of time.

If I could go back and take the course all over again, one thing I would do differently is to make a lamp with a different shape instead of just a cube. This would have been far more challenging and the result would also be way cooler.

I think that a change to the course that would be beneficial to my learning would be to rearrange the tables so that everyone’s seats are facing the whiteboard. I used to have a seat that had a big pillar blocking my view of the whiteboard, so it was hard to follow the tutorials on the whiteboard. Then, when the seating chart changed, I had a seat that was facing the opposite direction of the whiteboard, so I had to turn back and forth to see the whiteboard.